Enabling Water Smart Communities
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Water smart communities are essential enablers of new housing through reducing pressure on water resources, flood risk and water pollution. Without them, we cannot build the sustainable and affordable homes we need. But this requires a new approach that embraces interdependencies, addresses shared risks and opportunities, and designs new ways to deliver and steward assets.
Why must we enable water smart communities?
Frequent floods, increasing drought risk and water quality pressures are contributing towards challenges in delivering the more than 350,000 homes needed per year across England and Wales. In their current form new housing developments will stretch these demands to an unsustainable position: by 2050 many water resource zones will be in deficit and more homes will be at high risk of flooding. To enable sustainable and affordable housing growth an integrated water management approach is needed.
Enabling WSCs requires a group of actors to embrace principles of water stewardship to deliver and care for housing and water cycle assets for the benefit of people and the planet.
The EWSC project is exploring and piloting how new roles, partnerships and stewardship agreements might enable WSC, including scaling of innovative approaches within the community-led housing sector and elsewhere in the industry.
Enabling Water Smart Communities (EWSC) is an innovation project exploring the relationship between integrated water management (IWM) and housing development to unlock new opportunities for collaboration, delivery and long-term stewardship.